Five poets in conversation with Joshua and Ian Marley's creative creatures

This article analyses the reactions of five poets to Joshua and Ian Marley's creative creatures. Similarities and differences in the stimuli the poets react to, the ways in which they imitate the creatures morphologically, the patterns, names, Gestalts, scripts and archives they use to understand the creatures as well as their unique reactions are analysed. The poets are creative in the patterns they recognise and the ways in which they try to fit the creatures into known frames, wholes, names and scripts. The poems, however, also demonstrate strong techniques for containing these creatures and making them less threatening. In the end a few conclusions on creativity in these cases are formulated, namely that creativity is a mixture of iconising, pattern recognition (recalling familiar frames, scripts and archives) and naming and unnaming (efforts to describe the creatures wittily). A tension between creativity and making comes to light when one reads the poems against the back-ground of Horatius' norm of decorum.